Even as literature expresses its dependence on a reservoir of traditional methods of textualisation via intertextual strategies on the one hand, and complex negotiations of the aesthetic system on the other, literary texts cannot avoid registering and processing changes within the extraliterary world of knowledge. Didactic epic poetry as a genre is compelled to respond, in an especially pressing manner, to such transformations in established knowledge. This response is not accomplished through merely developing further, in a linear fashion, its already existing repertoire of methods of representation. Instead, the genre resorts to a re-encoding and re-combination of 'old' motifs, topics and structural procedures in order to come to terms with the epistemic innovation brought about by the unprecedented discourse of the 'new' scientific disciplines (Subproject 06 Roling). From the end of the Renaissance onwards, literature increasingly faces the task of reacting to extra-literary epistemic innovation. Yet, even as late as the 18th century, as far as the choice of literary devices and strategies is concerned (generic patterns etc.), the result of this process is not simply the replacement or supersession of tradition-bound approaches. Actually, quite the opposite is the case: what can be observed is a recourse to classicist forms of discourse in the service of negotiating innovation, a recourse which becomes manifest in particular varieties of hybrid constellations and which militates against previous research’s tendency to identify 'enlightened' literature as 'progressive' in terms not only of content, but of formal aesthetics, too (Subproject 08 Hempfer).